The Girl in the Green Sweater

by Chiger, Krystyna

  My mother always felt guilty that she had fallen asleep at such a critical time. She was crestfallen when she awoke and realized what Weinbergova had done. We were all upset about this, but my mother most of all. She thought that if she had stayed awake, the baby might have been spared. Perhaps this was so, but my mother was not to blame. No one was to blame. Also, at just that moment, no one in our group could say that Weinbergova’s decision was not for the best. Our underground chamber was no environment for an infant. His constant cries would have placed us in danger. Because of this, it was possible to look on this sad development as an act of great courage on the part of Genia Weinberg, only it did not appear so a little bit later that morning, when Socha arrived in our chamber with what he had thought would be his welcome news.

  Such a tragic moment! Such a cruel irony! For Weinbergova to learn that her baby might have been spared after all! That Socha had made arrangements for the baby to be raised by nuns, to have a chance at a full and happy life! It was the situation she had chosen for her young daughter, when Weinbergova had an opportunity to place her with an Aryan family to escape the liquidation, and it was the situation she would have chosen for her infant son, if only she had known that such a situation was possible.

  Poor Genia Weinberg was inconsolable, and she would remain so for the next while. For the next few days, she kept to the elbow of the L in relative privacy. She would not speak. She would not eat. She was weakened from the childbirth, so this contributed to her distant mood, but she was also broken by what she now regarded as the unnecessary death of her infant child. Gradually, however, she returned to her routines. She resumed her responsibilities with the cooking. She joined us when we were sitting and talking. She was not the same, of course, but she was back once again to the business of surviving, to making the best of what was left for her.

  The second death, sadly, was Babcia’s. In the end, the horrible conditions in the sewer became too much for old Mrs. Weiss, and she died in her sleep one night. She was asthmatic, and the dampness of the underground air was not helping her condition. Her breathing was becoming worse and worse. We could hear her wheezing all night long. Each day, it was a little more difficult for her to move. My mother had to help her when it was her turn for a bath. My mother checked her each day for lice, after she was through checking us children. My mother was at her side at the very end, holding her hand, and in the morning the men wrapped Babcia’s body and waited for Socha and Wroblewski to arrive and determine what they should do next.

  Socha was very superstitious. He did not want to be in our small chamber with a dead body. He told us what to do and then he left. Wroblewski, too. He was not so superstitious, but he would not stay without Socha.

  Berestycki said the prayers. I can still picture him in his flowing tallith, chanting the mourner’s Kaddish. Some of the other adults said a few words of remembrance. We all shed a few tears. Next, the men pushed Babcia’s body into the narrow pipe opening, and through the pipe to where it opened by the main canal. In this way they carried her to the Peltew. There they said another few prayers and buried her body in the river. Then the men returned to the Palace and to the rest of their lives. There was no traditional period of mourning for old Mrs. Weiss, just as there had been no traditional period of mourning for Weinbergova’s baby or my uncle Kuba or the others of our group who had been shot and killed upon leaving the sewer. We did not sit shiva. Every day for us was shiva, so we said our few prayers and shared our few thoughts and continued on.

  For the longest time, we had been a group of eleven. For the briefest time, we were a group of twelve. Now we were ten, and I began to worry that this was the start of some new heartbreaking pattern, that one by one we would take turns leaving, that soon we would be just my immediate family, and that after that we would be no more.

  Eight

  THE PRISONER

  These life and death developments led me to a period of despair unlike any I had known. I did not know to call it a depression, but that is most certainly what it was. My parents, too, did not know to give my new mood a name. All they knew was that I had become silent, sullen, sad. This was in such contrast with my usual cheerful personality that of course they worried. I became a different little girl.

  I cannot say what precisely brought this change to my temperament. Perhaps it was the many long hours in hiding in our ghetto apartments. Perhaps it was the weight of all the time in the sewer, detached from a normal childhood existence. Perhaps it was the one-by-one death and departure of the others in our underground family. Perhaps it was the erosion of the very hope that had sustained us all along. Probably it was all these things taken together at once, all of a sudden.

  I could be philosophical at times, but regarding my own circumstance or disposition I was not so introspective or insightful. I was not self-aware. All I could do when one of the adults asked what was troubling me was shrug my shoulders. Sometimes I could not manage even that. I could not put what I was feeling into words. I would not even try. For a week or more, I continued in this way. I would barely eat. My mother told me later it reminded her of the time when I was a stubborn little girl, refusing to eat for the nanny I did not like, but it was not the same thing to me. It was not anything I could control. I was not trying to be stubborn. I simply did not feel like eating. I did not participate in our evening social hour, but it was not because I was being difficult. I only had nothing to say.

  My father wrote about my depression in his memoir. He wrote how I appeared lost to him and my mother, how the life seemed to disappear from my eyes and from my soul. After so long underground, so long in darkness, so long in uncertainty, I was alive but at the same time lifeless. I was breathing, but that was all.

  Whenever I could, I would listen to the playful cries of the children in the square above our underground hiding place. This was where my mind would wander. In the afternoons, I could hear the children most of all, particularly on Sundays, before and after church. Such joy! Such innocence! I longed to be among such children once more, to play their games, share their jokes, sing their songs, breathe their fresh air, smell their flowers. This last became a small obsession. Whenever I did manage to utter a few words, it would be about the flowers. I wanted to talk only about the flowers and how much I wanted to hold a fresh bouquet in my hands.

  It was Socha who finally rescued me from my melancholy. For days and days, I had not eaten my share of Socha’s sandwich when he offered it to me. I had not smiled in greeting when he and Wroblewski appeared through the opening to our chamber. I had not read to Socha to show him my progress in this area, because I was not making any progress between his visits. For many days, I had not done a single thing eagerly, and only a few things reluctantly. Yet despite the transparent change to my personality, Socha did not seek to intervene. Probably he did not think this was his place, to take an active role in such a delicate matter with someone else’s child. He was like a second father to me, after everything he had done, yet I was not his daughter.

  My mother was desperate. She worried that my temperament had been forever changed, that her Krysha would never be returned to her, and one day she spoke with Socha about her concern. This was when Socha did a remarkable thing. He took me into a quiet corner of our underground chamber. He held my hand. He said, “Krysha, you have to eat.”

  I said, “But I am not hungry.”

  He said, “You have to speak. Your parents are worried about you. Your underground family is worried about you.”

  I said, “But I have nothing to say.”

  He said, “Let us see about that.”

  Socha led me by the hand to the narrow pipe that opened into our chamber. He indicated for me to climb inside. It had been about a year, and I had never once left the Palace. The men had all taken turns leaving and returning. Every day, they would come and go as if heading back and forth to work. Klara had left from time to time. My mother had crawled through this pipe several times to complete some chore or other.
But I had not moved from the small room even once, and here Socha was waiting for me to crawl away from my family. My parents had not said anything about this, and Socha did not say where we were going. He only said, “Come. Let me show you something.”

  And so I went. We crawled in silence for several kilometers until we came finally to a hatch and then to another iron ladder built into the stone wall. We climbed the ladder to an opening leading to the street. Here I could see the sunlight peering through the sewer grate. It was the first bit of sunshine I had seen in over a year. I lifted my face to it, to soak in its warmth. I could not believe it, that I was feeling this little bit of sunshine. A part of me had believed the sun had set so long ago.

  I listened to the children playing outside, just beyond the sewer grate. Their voices seemed so much closer than they had when I could hear them in the Palace. It was as if I were outside with them, running and playing and laughing. It was as if the other children were near enough to touch. For a moment, I tried to be happy.

  Socha said, “You have to be strong, little one. In just a few days, you will be up there playing with the other children. You will smell the same flowers.”

  And in this way I became whole once again. Because Socha had willed it so.

  I was no sooner returned from my brief depression than a disaster nearly put an end to us all. It was once again the height of the rainy season, as it had been a year earlier when the cascading waters claimed my uncle Kuba as he was trapped in one of the narrow pipes. Now it was spring, and as the snow began to melt, there was a torrential rain. It was inevitable that we would experience a storm during this time of year, but it was an especially unfortunate time for such a heavy storm. We heard the clap of thunder from our underground chamber. We heard the rushing water from the hard rain and the snowmelt as it crashed into the sewer. It was such a sudden downpour, such a sudden overflow, that the sewer could not accommodate all the water at once.

  Very quickly, there was a flash flood that caused the Peltew to spill over its banks, to go along with the backup from the streets above. Our small underground chamber was attacked from above and below by torrents of water. The volume of water from the Bernardynski and Halicki squares had no place to go but down, the rising tides from the river had no place to go but up, and we were caught in the treacherous middle. Within moments the Palace began to fill. We had talked in theory about just such a prospect with Socha and Wroblewski, who knew from experience how dangerous the rushing waters could be during rainy season, but despite these warnings we had believed we were relatively safe and dry in our perch beneath the Bernardynski church. That is, we believed we were safe until we realized we were not, and we went from sloshing in water at our feet and ankles to wading in water waist-deep and higher in the time it took to panic. Soon, the rising water reached Pawel’s chin, and soon after that to mine. My parents had to lift us up to allow us to breathe the wet air, and still the water kept rising. We were certain we would all drown.

  The adults in our group stretched to their full height—on tiptoe, some of them, to keep their faces above water. There was a second pipe that fed into our chamber, to go along with the one just above the ground that we used as our primary entrance and exit, and it was through this second pipe, high along the opposite wall, that most of the water fell. During the frenzy of trying to keep his head above water, my father managed to take off his shirt and attempt to divert the water with it from the high pipe to the low pipe across the room. The other men thought to divert the flow with blankets and shovels and other crude tools. But there was no way to stop the flood. The men succeeded only in exhausting themselves and exerting a few extra breaths they probably did not have to spare. The water kept coming and coming, the level kept rising and rising, and we had only a short moment to consider our certain demise.

  Pawel and I, we were plainly terrified. I do not think I had ever heard my little brother scream as loudly as he did during this unfolding moment. There was no reason to quiet our voices—we could not be heard above the roar of the rushing water. We would be dead before we would be discovered. Me, I did not scream so much as shriek. As we opened our mouths we were swallowing up the rushing water. I thought that we would surely drown, that we were drowning already.

  Somehow, I managed to grab Jacob Berestycki’s coat. I was pulling and pulling at it, like a lifeline. I said, “Pray, Jacob, pray!” Jakob, modl sie! Over and over, I said this. I thought since he prayed every day, he would be closest to God. If our prayers would be heard, it would be through Jacob Berestycki.

  By yet another miracle, the water level started to subside. We had stretched ourselves to ceiling height in our small chamber. There had been barely enough air to breathe between the top of the water and the bottom of our low ceiling, and as we grabbed what we all believed would be our few final breaths and our final few glances at one another, the water began to drain. Whatever pipes had been momentarily clogged feeding in and out of our chamber were now cleared. Whatever prayers Berestycki managed to utter on our behalf, they had made it through, and very quickly we were left only with piles and piles of mud to clean from our small chamber. Everything we owned had floated away. Pots, pans, spoons, tins of food, and other supplies . . . all of it, gone. The planks of woods and other items that had been too heavy to float away had managed to drop to the mud at our feet once the water receded.

  But we were alive. This was the most important thing. This was the only thing. Our tools and supplies could be replaced as needed, but we could not so easily replace one another, so we allowed ourselves the small sigh of survivors after an especially harrowing ordeal. It had been such a brief but powerful display of the might of the Peltew, the might of the elements. It was unbelievable, really; we had been living here along the rank shores of the river for over a year, and in all that time we had never truly considered the danger of these rushing waters. Yes, we had lost my uncle Kuba to these rushing waters, and still we did not feel in jeopardy, until now.

  The next morning, Socha and Wroblewski came to our underground chamber expecting to find only our corpses. Before climbing down into the sewer, in fact, Socha stopped at his church to light a candle of remembrance for each of us, such was his certainty that we had perished. He believed some of us would have undoubtedly been swallowed up by the currents, and some of us would remain in the Palace even in death, as silent and still as we had been in life. But there we were, all ten of us, living and breathing still. It was the most astonishing thing, and Socha came to regard it as an act of divine providence. We could not help but agree, because surely there had been a guiding hand to see us safely to the other side of our ordeal.

  For the rest of our time in the sewer, I was deathly afraid of rain. For the rest of my life, this fear has continued, but here is where it began. I had only recently been freed from the grip of a fleeting depression, and now I was gripped in fear over the sound of even the slightest rain dripping into our chamber. Whenever it started to rain, however slightly, I would say to my mother, “It will be a big rain, Mama?” Bedzie ulewa, Mama? Long after the war, this was what I would say to my mother whenever the rain started to fall. “It will be a big rain?” Even into adulthood, I would become tense and nervous at the sound of a heavy rain. It would take me back to that time in the Palace when all appeared lost. It did not matter that we had managed to escape the floodwaters with only a story to tell. It mattered that I was made to consider our demise in the first place.

  All this time, my father had been charting the progress of the Soviets. It was our best hope, he said, that the same Russian army that had once so oppressed us would now be our saviors. Every day, my father would huddle with Socha and study a map of Poland. Together they would read between the lines of propaganda in the daily newspapers and try to gauge the progress of the war. They would read the German newspapers, the Russian newspapers, the Polish newspapers. In between, they would discover the truth of the war. Every day, it was changing. One day, the Germans were advancing. T
he next day, the Germans were retreating. One day, the Russians would enjoy a success on the front. The next day, there would be a setback. As the Russians moved west, my father was pushing papers here and there, studying the situation. He would point to places on the map and say, “They are not here, they are not here.” Always, he had to know what was going on. He was like a general, fighting to win the war on his pieces of paper.

  I listened in and allowed myself to become excited at these developments, but it was not always a positive turn. Kowalow noted with concern one morning that Wehrmacht officials were preparing a land mine operation on the streets around the Bernardynski church. The houses there had been abandoned and taken up by German officials, who of course wanted to see their homes protected from Russian tanks. Also, the Germans kept a headquarters office in this square and so were taking pains to protect the high-ranking officials who worked there as well. As part of this initiative, German soldiers began tearing up the streets and placing active mines just below the surface. This was a potential disaster for our party below, and Kowalow signaled Socha and Wroblewski to return to the surface to discuss the matter.